Calorie Counting Formula For Your Workouts

Gym machines are horrible at tracking your heart rate and they don’t consider a lot of factors when counting the calories you burn during your workout. Here are some factors that might influence your calorie counting:

– the level of intensity you’re working out at;
– your body temperature;
– your workout environment (temperature, wind, rain);
– your muscle mass;
– your resting metabolic rate;
– your fitness level.

The foods you eat daily, your body-fat percentage, how much do you sleep and your general metabolism also can influence the amount of calories you’re burning throughout your workout. The fitness trackers at the gym are usually so far off in their estimates  because they aren’t individualized enough.

You Burn Calories While Breathing

Maybe you’ve already noticed, but when you’re working out hard and you’re pushing yourself to the limit, your breathing gets faster and your heartbeat increases.

This happens because your heart is trying to get as much oxygen as it can and pump it out to your muscles. In your muscles it is produced ATP (adenosine triphosphate) energy that fuels your entire body during the exercises.

For every one liter of oxygen you breathe in, your body burns five calories. So people who breathe more during their workouts will be burning more calories than people who don’t breathe as heavily. This means that a workout will be more taxing, and will therefore burn more calories, for someone who is in worse shape.

Calorie Counting Formula For A Workout

Bear in mind this is another imperfect estimate based on lack of consideration of fitness level, age and gender. But it does get you a pretty accurate number of how many calories you’re burning. Here is the calorie counting formula:

• MET x Your Weight [kg] x Workout time [min] x Constant (0.0175)

MET is your metabolic equivalent, or the intensity rate at which you’re working out. This is a number between 0.9 and 23. You have a 0.9 MET when you’re asleep and a 23 MET when you’re running at 4:17 mile pace. Scientists already made a list with MET for a lot of activities, so check it out here.

Once you’ve found your MET, multiply it by your weight in kilograms. You need to divide your weight by 2.2046 if you’re converting from pounds.

You don’t need any special tool or calculation to find out your workout time, but your clock. Be sure to use your workout time in minutes.

We consume 3.5 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight. After we transform this number in liters, we get 0.0035 liters of oxygen. Then we need to multiply this by 5, because we burn 5 calories for every 1 liter of oxygen breathed in. So the constant we use in this calorie counting formula is 0.0175.

Example

If I am a 150 pound woman and I do a 30 minute run at a 5 miles per hour pace (12 min/mile), how many calories do I burn?

Here is the data we need:

1. MET for a women running at 5 mph is 8.3.
2.  My weight is 150 pounds, which means 150/2.2046 = 68.04 kgs.
3. The workout time is 30 minutes.
4.  The constant is 0.0175.
5. Result = 8.3 x 68.04 x 30 x 0.0175 = 296.4843

That is the number of calories you burned.9.88281×30 = 296.4843.

Therefore, a woman who weigh 150 lbs and runs at 5 mph for 30 minutes would have burned around 296 calories during that workout, according to this calorie counting formula.